Voice of the people (letter).

Honor Great Works On Their Own Terms

January 28, 1993|By Theodore L. Gross, President and professor of humanities, Roosevelt University.

CHICAGO — Your editorial (Jan. 16) lamenting that Chaucer no longer occupies a primary place in the curriculum and criticizing Illinois State University's conversion of its 127-year old motto from Chaucer's "And gladly would he learn and teach" to "Gladly we learn and teach" underscore two compelling influences on higher education: multiculturalism and feminism.

The advocates of multiculturalism tell us that students must be aware of cultures beyond those of the Western world. Who would argue with this position, given the global neighborhood in which we live and the need to understand the peoples of the world? But there is a healthy tension between this point of view and the need to understand the foundations of our own culture, its political systems, its language, its great authors.

What does it mean when we eliminate Chaucer from the curriculum? Like Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and Eliot, Chaucer is one of the greatest of English authors. His "Canterbury Tales" is not only a portrait gallery of human nature (the "Wife of Bath" illuminates feminism, "The Clerk's Tale" education, "The Knight's Tale" manners, etc.); it is our most vivid record of an age, written in some of the most memorable English poetry we have.

The quality of "The Canterbury Tales" renders it a classic: Seven centuries of readers have told us so. When we discard it or treat it with indifference, we diminish our curriculum, as if art historians were to discard or level Raphael, DaVinci or Michelangelo, or musicologists Bach or Mozart; we diminish ourselves.

Against this need to preserve what Matthew Arnold called "the best that has been thought and said" is the need to widen our education to include the cultures of other civilizations-the best that they have thought and said. But the impulse toward multiculturalism should not come at the expense of our own great works of art, those that have given us our language and customs and political science, our culture itself, and it should be measured qualitatively, not quantitatively. Classics do matter and students should read them.

The conversion of "gladly would he learn and teach" to "gladly we learn and teach" is still another modernization of a college's motto and an understandable response to feminism and the desire to be non-sexist; but it is equally troubling as these alterations occur across our culture, whether in colorizing original film classics or in changing words that had significance for the time.

When authors wrote "Negro" rather than African-American or black, "ladies" rather than "women," when they used "he" generically to include "she," they were using the language of their time and the usage should be honored, however much our views have broadened and our contemporary use of language seeks to become an emancipated reflection of our own culture. History does matter and, to paraphrase Santayana, we will be condemned to repeat it if we don't understand it-on the terms in which it was experienced.

As the president of a university, I can understand the desire to modernize mottos so that they offend no one-this may indeed be the Age of Educational Pablum.

As a professor of the humanities, I hope I never forget that great works of art need to be considered on their own terms before they are adapted to modern needs and that there is a qualitative distinction in cultural works of all civilizations-beginning with our own.